Who Makes the Decision on Your Bellevue Disability Benefits Claim?

After your Social Security disability benefits application leaves the district office where you initially submitted it, it is assigned to a disability examiner at Disability Determination Services (DDS) in Nebraska, or the Disability Determination Services Bureau (DDSB) in Iowa. There is at least one Disability Determination office in each state, typically employing hundreds of disability examiners.

What does the disability examiner do?

The Social Security disability examiner approves or denies your initial application for disability benefits. In preparing to make the determination, the examiner must handle a number of administrative duties necessary to decide your case. This includes:

Contacting you if necessary to obtain information during the determination process.

Sending out questionnaires and forms about your daily activities, symptoms and work history

Scheduling a consultative examination for you if information is insufficient.

Adding results from any consultative examinations to your file.

Collecting information about your relevant prior work history, usually going back 15 years.

Obtaining school records and other basic information about your education only if necessary.

Collecting all the necessary information can take weeks—even months. Out-of-date contact information can lead to significantly longer waits—or, worse yet, automatic denials, so make sure that the examiner knows of any changes to your phone number or mailing address.

Once the examiner has collected all the relevant information, he or she will collaborate with an on-staff medical consultant to build a disability determination. This document will explain:

The nature of your health condition,

Whether or not your health condition constitutes a disability in itself, and

If you have strong enough residual functional capacity—the capacity to perform the basic tasks necessary for employment—to hold down a job.

If your application is approved, Social Security determines how much of a benefit you will receive and starts making payments. If it is denied, your entire file, including the determination document, is returned to the district office where you applied in case you decide to appeal.